1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording apparatus which photographs a document image on a microfilm, and reads the document image as an electric signal (digital image reading) by means of a photoelectric conversion device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a known conventional recording apparatus of the above type, an image of a document introduced into the apparatus is photographed on a microfilm as the document is conveyed in the apparatus, and, at the same time, the image is read by means of a photoelectric conversion device.
In the above recording apparatus, the speed at which documents are conveyed is preset to a fixed, relatively low speed due to the following reason: although the images of the documents can be photographed on the microfilm at high speed, it is not easy for the photoelectric conversion device to read the images at a correspondingly high speed. To increase the reading speed to a level at which it can keep pace with the high-speed photographing, it would be necessary to provide a high-speed/high-sensitivity photoelectric conversion device and, further, a high-speed image processing circuit, resulting in the apparatus becoming very complicated and expensive. Thus, the document conveying speed has to be set at a reasonable level conforming with the reading speed of the reading means, which is relatively low, to prevent the cost of the apparatus from increasing and the structure thereof from becoming more complicated.
The operator can check each of the images read by the reading means, which consists of a photoelectric conversion device, by displaying them one by one on a display before recording them on a recording medium, such as a magneto-optical disc. When this checking is to be performed, the operator has to feed the documents one by one into the apparatus at appropriate intervals or a document feeding mechanism for feeding documents at proper intervals has to be provided at a position on the upstream side of the photographing and reading position with respect to the direction in which the documents are conveyed. However, such a manual feeding operation by the operator is rather bothersome, while, on the other hand, the provision of a feeding mechanism as mentioned above leads to an increase in cost and a more complicated structure of the recording apparatus.